Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Battlesystem reborn

Last year I needed to handle mass combat as the J Squad at Gold Star Anime as they ventured into a orc infested forest. I ultimately chose to use 1st Edition Battle System mostly because I discovered that the core combat formula is applicable for nearly every edition of DnD including many of the retro-clones. Another important reason is that Battlesystem scales seamlessly from mass armies to a single PC. It not until you run a mass combat battle you see how effective the old 1 attack per level rule is for fighters.

Along with this I found that the rules themselves are remarkably brief. The main rulebook is 32 pages but that mostly because it is illustrations and example. The actual rules amount to a handful of pages.

So what do I find on the Internet? An announcement that Wizards will be releasing Battlesystem. It short on details on the mechanics but it sounds like it will very much in the spirit of the 1st edition. I don't know if my blog posts had any influence on +Mike Mearls and his team, however it great to see this aspect of DnD to be supported again.

I do know that to this day that me breaking out all the Dragon counters still causes my friend +Tim Shorts and +Dwayne Gillingham to break out in a cold sweat.

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.